Bullying vs. Creating Climate of Peace: Prof. Garbarino at Teachers College
by Sarah N. Lynch

Bullying was the topic of the Virginia and Leornard Marx Lecture at Teachers College recently.

The lecture featured James Garbarino, the co-director of the Family Life Development Center and a professor of human development at Cornell University. Garbarino, who has won numerous awards for his efforts to aid neglected and abused children, spoke about the findings in his most recent book, Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence.

“Clearly our country has, in the last ten years, begun to mobilize and get aroused about the issues of bullying, harassment and emotional violence,” Garbarino said. “The biggest single reason for that is the rash of school shootings in communities around the country.”

“These school shootings have had, as a common theme, a reaction to bullying, harassment and emotional violence.”

Garbarino pointed out that while the problem of bullying has only recently emerged as an issue of concern in schools, it has always been a problem that Americans just failed to address.

“One of the things that strikes me as bizarre about this issue is that it is not a new issue for us. If we probed our memory, we could remember bullying and harassment from our own school days. And yet this issue has leapt into the national consciousness. I think what is happening is we’re finally starting to see something that’s been before our eyes but has been largely invisible for a long time.”

One of the problems with bullying in America is that in many cases, people either ignore it or even go so far as to view it as being preferable, according to Garbarino. Garbarino said that people overlooked the damaging impact bullying can have on a child.

“It’s even seen as desirable by many people, as a right of passage. In newspaper accounts of hazing in sports teams, a substantial proportion of the community says it’s good for kids to be sodomized. It’s good for kids to have urine poured on their faces because it’s a ritual of passage. We did it when I was on the team and they’ll do it now.”

Garbarino noted that one of the important steps that schools need to take in order to address the problem of bullying is not only to work with bullies and victims, but also with the bystanders as well.

“The conventional research on bullying states that a third of kids are involved in bullying at any particular time, a third of those as victims, a third as perpetrators and bullies and a third as both,” Garbarino said.

“Some kids are bullies in the morning and victims at night or victims the day before and bullies next Thursday. When you actually look at the psychological reality of the phenomenon, it turns out that the bystanders—the people who are neither victims nor bullies—are as much traumatized sometimes as the victims are. When you look at it this way, virtually all children are embedded in this phenomenon of bullying harassment and emotional violence.”

Garbarino said that approaching the problem of bullying is not a matter “of going to war,” against bullying, but a matter of creating a “social context that breeds peace.”#

Name:- E-mail: City: State: Comments:

Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 1588, New York, NY 10159.
Tel: (212) 477-5600. Fax: (212) 477-5893. Email: ednews1@aol.com.
All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2003.